When Matty had his accident he had few possessions on him that were turned over to me. His ball cap, flight bag, belt, cell phone, wallet, money clip, pen and watch. The impact of the plane was so significant that the phone was rendered useless, his bracelet, which I found later was buried in the dirt outside the plane, and his watch band was broken and timepiece appeared to not be working. All of these items were turned over to me in a very methodical manner, in sealed plastic bags, in accordance with any accident where a death had occurred. Shortly after the accident we removed the cell phone from the bag in a pointless attempt to get it to work. For all practical purposes, the watch appeared to be dead. That was until I was going through Matty's things the other day, some 3 months after the accident.

I picked up the sealed bag and looked at the items and watch again. The watch appeared to be working, but not quite. The second hand appeared to be moving forward and backward about 20 seconds. The time on the watch was about 6 minutes past noon, which was just about the time Matty and the student were supposed to have initially taken off. That didn't really make sense to me, as the accident supposedly happened about an hour and a half later. It was almost as if the watch was locked on the moment Matty took off, not crashed. One would think the watch should have stopped at around 1:43 which is about the time the accident was reported.

This really perplexed me and I cracked the sealed bag open to have a closer look. The strap was broken, and sure enough, the second hand was desperately attempting to work it's way past the 50-54 second mark. The watch is a Timex, but that only explained so much. Read into it what you want, but it's like time in Matty's world was standing still, not at the moment he crashed, but the moment he took off for the last time. A little freaky, but quite remarkable. I found this phenomenon so peculiar that I set the watch up and videotaped a little bit of it.

The video is in real time and completely unedited. It runs a little over 5 minutes so you can get the full effect of what's happening. It's not real exciting video, so I felt compelled to put some music to it. The song is from Creed. A little hard rockish for any elders among you, but it's about finding God and going to heaven.

I wrote out the lyrics to the right which are quite fitting. Enjoy.


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